“Unfortunate,” said Rebecca.
“I shall not weep for long for them when I find a husband. This ship is full of such possibility! Think of the bachelors, businessmen and club men, and the young men with rich fathers, and the possibilities of love from one of them. I suppose one might even try slipping off the side into the waves to wait to be rescued.”
“Yes,” Rebecca said quietly. Her raven black hair had been loosened by the breeze and fell pleasantly over her face. “One might also drown,” she said wryly.
“Oh, or being shipwrecked, just the two of you!” came the oblivious response. Christie chatted on, “You're spoken of as one of the four prettiest maidens aboard. Mind, that's in spite of a too-high brow and the fact that you haven't a bit of style to speak of with your mourning clothes, which make you look so pale and strong-willed. Why not put a flower in your belt sometimes as a starter for any lover's casual flirtation? And you always have a book at your hip like some kind of tomboy. What of that charming young man you're traveling with? There are plenty of women who have designs on him, if you are too selective for his hand.”
“I am here to work,” said Rebecca, looking away so the girl would not see her cheeks coloring, her body betraying her when she most needed it to submit. “I should like very much to prove myself capable of working as a self-supporting individual. That is all I seek from Mr. Osgood.”
“He dresses nicely and keeps his temper.”
“Well, yes, he does.”
“That is what matters.”
“He is much less ordinary and average than that,” Rebecca objected.
“What's your counsel?”
“What do you mean my counsel?”
“Yes, on impressing your Mr. Osgood!”
“He is not my… My counsel is that Mr. Osgood is occupied with his business affairs and not nonsense.”
“A pity!” replied her companion, disappointed by James Osgood's inverted priorities. “I would have invited you to the wedding, you know.”
During their voyage, Rebecca would often meet Osgood in the ship's library to help compose letters to Dickens's publishing representatives in London or draft other documents. Though she could not dine at his table or take part in first-class pastimes, one pleasant afternoon she was sitting out on a deck chair reading the pages of Drood, wearing a wrap to protect herself against the wind. She had been joined by some girls who were knitting. In a nearby porthole, she noticed a reflection of the parlor, where Osgood was playing chess, a game that Rebecca had taught Daniel to fill his evenings at the boardinghouse in Boston after he had stopped drinking.
At first, feeling she should not spy, she tried returning her attention to her reading but could not help herself. She became fascinated at the idea of watching her employer without him knowing. She had to remind herself that she'd remained a bit disappointed toward Osgood, and as though a sort of punishment of him, she decided she should withhold her interest. But before long, she was so enamored by the maneuvers of the game that she concocted her own silent strategies. Osgood reached a critical turn, his hand frozen above the table, and she urged him mentally to move the knight to the back left of his opponent's board.
That will do it, Mr. Osgood! she thought. She knew he would do nothing more than smile politely if he won, so as not to belittle the other player.
A moment later, after withdrawing his hand from several aborted moves, he chose the move she counseled. She clapped her hands in delight, and two of the girls peered over their knitting with shaking heads.
Even after only a few days at sea, she felt herself to be in an entirely different world from Boston. The voyage did not remove Daniel from her mind. In his absence, she realized how much of his resilience and buoyancy had passed into her own ambitions for herself. His voice had become part of her inner life in a way she could not de-scribe. The voyage made her feel temporarily at peace about his death, as though he were part of the endless expanse of sky and saltwater and warm breezes.
ONE WARM MORNING, Osgood was walking along the upper deck in a general abstraction. The winds were picking up and the ship was shakier than it had been. Nausea gradually spread to a few new people each day. The ship's doctor passed out small drafts of morphine to calm the nerves. Passengers who were not sick had grown bored of chess and cards and of talking politics over cigars. Soon, not even the dinner bell interested them; only a whale sighting could temporarily stir the general sluggishness. But not Osgood-Osgood had avoided ennui entirely.
He remained industrious, well dressed and engrossed in his coming mission. While other men were now regularly unshaven, his mustache was trim and his face clean. Osgood saw this not just as habit but necessity. His face, though composed of pleasant-enough features, was rather inconspicuous, not to say nondescript. In fact, it was not uncommon for a person who had met Osgood in one place-say, the Tremont Street office-to then, perhaps days later, meet with him in another setting-the bridge at the Public Garden-and evince not a shred of recognition. Sometimes a change of sunlight to gaslight, or a Saturday rather than a Tuesday, was known to produce the same confusion in those attempting to place a memory of the publisher's identity. This all would be made more problematic had Osgood ever changed the cut of a single hair, which the publisher did not dare to do. It might risk him waking up one morning and finding his home and position taken away from him.
Osgood had continued to study the pages of The Mystery of Edwin Drood he had brought with him. The book was different from the usual Dickens work and his most artistic endeavor since A Tale of Two Cities. It was the work of a ripe genius, restrained and taut, and would have been his masterpiece when finished, Osgood was convinced, and like any masterpiece equally beloved and misunderstood. Morbid and dark, it had a divided family of the fictionally named Cloisterham village and only a bleak hope for happiness for them. The characters were infused with such life that one could almost feel that they would step out of the pages and act out the remainder of the story without Dickens's pen to help. The looming question lurked at the end of the existing pages: Was Edwin Drood, the young hero, murdered? Or was he in hiding, waiting to return triumphantly?
Of course, there was no thinking of Drood's disappearance without thinking of Dickens's death. The two were welded together for all time now. Would learning more about one ease the sad reality of the other? This was the momentum of Osgood's thoughts as he roamed the deck when he lost his balance on a slippery board and, before he could grab the railing, fell down hard on his back.
After a moment of confusion, he realized he was being offered a hand. Or a head, to be precise-the gold head of a heavy walking cane. Osgood reached hesitantly for the ugly, fanged monster carving and started to pull himself to his feet. Osgood had seen this man, with the wide mustache and brown turban, who kept mostly to himself, grumbling occasional demands to a waiter or steward, waving this queer cane around. Osgood had heard him referred to as Herman, and thought he appeared to be Parsee, but knew nothing else of him.
“All right?” Herman asked in his gravelly voice.
Osgood lowered himself back down, feeling a pain run through his back.
“I'll send for the ship's surgeon,” Herman said, with a cold but polite tone.
By this point, a small circle of passengers from all steerages and several crew members had gathered at the spot of the fall. Rebecca saw the crowd forming and ran as fast as she could move her legs in her narrow dress. She had to squeeze through the other girls, who were making a show of their concern.
“Well, you are a goose!” said Christie. “We were here first, miss,” said another girl from their steerage, a gaudy redhead.